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Arcbound Ravaging : American Heroic

Arcbound Ravaging: American HeroicBy Daniel Suydam

My name is Daniel Suydam and I'm the manager of Gamers Paradise. I'm a semi-professional Magic: The Gathering player and amateur tatto artist...just kidding! In all seriousness (I joke a lot), I love playing Magic. Building off-the-wall, high variance decks is what I do best. If you know me, then you know my love of attacking. If you don't, then you're about to find out, and maybe love it a little too.

Today, I will be focusing on Battlefield Thaumaturge. My love of creatures with hexproof goes all the way back to Mirrodin and playing with Troll Ascetic. Battlefield Thaumaturge, while excellent at dodging removal, doesn't do much for the traditional hexproof game-plan. It does, however, enable an affinity style synergy plan with its much more important static ability.

Giving us the ability to tap all of our opponents creatures and trigger heroic on all of ours (tapping our tapped attackers after changing combat-phases) for only one U or one W mana is very powerful indeed. What about turning all of our creatures into mini Heroes of Bladehold for a single W mana?

Don't even get me started on all the heroic triggers we will have with Anax and Cymede, giving all our guys trample and +1/+1 multiple times. With a Phalanx Leader in play, that +1/+1 until end of turn becomes +1/+1 counters and becomes a mini Gavony Township! Toss in a Hidden Strings and you're talking about a free Overrun for your whole team.

My favorite interaction in the deck wasn't in my original decklist: Last Friday Jeffrey Clark showed up for FNM. Somehow, I convinced him to the play the deck. Ten minutes later we had thirty people signed up for FNM. I told Jeff he was actually playing for decent prizes and we quickly threw together a sideboard. I had an Armed // Dangerous randomly in my box so we threw it in the deck for a little spice. After round two, Jeff told me what he did with the card and I was blown away. As it turns out, with Battlefield Thaumaturge and a Mana Confluence in play, it reads: "2RG Target player loses the game." Basically, if your opponent is playing creatures, all but one of your creatures are unblockable. If your opponent isn't playing creatures, you are still getting two heroic triggers and most likely have a giant double striking monstrosity.

After playing some games with the deck, I have concluded that the deck lives up to expectations: It has good match-ups across the board, with the exception that is is quite bad against mono black devotion. In short, if you expect to see a lot of mono black devotion, you may want to leave this deck in the bag. I have beaten the deck a few times, but it is still an uphill battle and one you most likely don't want to be fighting all day long. If you expect there will be less mono black devotion, I would certainly give this deck a shot as it can be very powerful and extremely fun to play.

I would really like to get some feedback on my article - good or bad. Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading,